Remembrance Day - Brian Aldiss

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happens in international affairs. I can remember back to the aftermath of World War II. Just when we were sorting out the peace and trying to put everything together, along came the threat from the Soviet Union, and the Cold War descended upon us, warping millions of lives for decades.’

      ‘That may be so, but it doesn’t have much to do with Yarmouth.’ He should have known that such a remark would not have ended the discussion.

      A sagacious finger was wagged at him. ‘I hope it has everything to do with Yarmouth,’ Embry said. ‘There I shall test out my hypothesis of transpsychic reality …’ He repeated the phrase thoughtfully, as if more for his benefit than his listener’s. ‘Transpsychic reality … If I’m right, then a new epoch in human relationships will dawn. I shall father a revolution in how we view the physical world around us …’ He took a deep breath and then said, suddenly, ‘I should have gone to the john before we left the restaurant.’

      ‘We’d better get back to the hotel.’

      The bladder problem evidently wasn’t too serious. Embry dismissed it with a grand gesture. The physical world was going to have to wait.

      They had come to the end of the carpark. Beyond some smart new plastic warehousing, masts of dinghies could be seen. Music of the swing era could be heard.

      ‘I may as well admit it, Gordy. It’s an ambitious plan, and it will need a whole heap of moral support from Sir Alastair Stern, not least because of the depressed state of the British economy in 1990. I want your father-in-law on my side.’

      He outlined the circumstances of the case as clearly as if he was lecturing a class.

      One of the depressants afflicting British life was the situation in Northern Ireland, which cost the British taxpayer many millions of pounds sterling a year. The Irish Republican Army, the IRA, although not politically effective, existed as a disruptive force in social life. In the mid-eighties, it had attempted a major coup when it planned a series of bomb outrages in English seaside towns during the holiday season.

      Scotland Yard had got wind of the plan. Bombs of Czech-made Semtex were detected and defused in six towns along the South Coast. Three men had been arrested, including a high-ranking IRA officer. Unfortunately, one bomb had escaped detection. It exploded in a small hotel in Yarmouth.

      ‘Four people were killed in the Great Yarmouth explosion,’ Embry said as they climbed into his car. ‘I am not concerned with the IRA. Though I may say parenthetically I do not approve of American support for the IRA. They can be described only as terrorists, killing and maiming innocent people. My AUN unit will investigate the lives lost.

      ‘Who were those four persons killed that day? What were their lives like? What brought them to that hotel on that date? Was their presence merely stochastic, or had it to do with, say, economic conditions?’

      ‘Or the hand of God?’ hinted Levine, smiling.

      ‘We are open-minded. We rule nothing out. Not even the Immanent Will. “Veni, Redemptor”. I do not go into this project with preconceived ideas, Gordy. I want to establish whether the random was at work, or were those deaths circumstance-chain deaths – with submerged social causation of the same kind that draws me back to ancestral ground?

      ‘It’s going to be an original and epoch-making sociological field exercise. Who exactly were the four who died that day in the Hotel Dianoya in Great Yarmouth?’

      2

      Displaced

      Midsummer 1986

      The car was an orange Hillman which had seen better days. Ray Tebbutt drove it with the kind of care he devoted to most matters, slowing to corner, braking gently to stop, signalling whenever humanly possible. He left the main Fakenham–Cromer road and turned north in third gear. Although the side road was empty of traffic this summer evening, he handled the wheel as cautiously as if in one of the city traffic jams to which he had previously been accustomed.

      Clamp Lane was a narrow strip between high banks. History had split it open to the sun like a walnut. Within living memory, the lane had been shaded by elms, their woody topknots havens for birds. The trees were all that remained of extensive forest which had once choked this region of Norfolk before the Enclosures Acts of the previous century had begun a process of denudation. Then Dutch Elm Disease, spread through the importation of cheap foreign timber, had wiped out the last grand sentinels. Three summers and they were gone, and the birds they sheltered gone with them. Clamp Lane was now bathed in impartial summer sun, banal, no longer secret, me-andering between unfrequented wheat fields, easy going for orange Hillmans.

      Tebbutt slowed still further where the road sloped into a depression which provided some shelter from the wind for two cottages, solitary in the landscape. Like the landscape, these two Victorian cottages, close yet apart, built for farm labourers, were dominated by the socio-economics of their time. Machinery had superseded the labourers; they and their families were gone long ago, as the birds had gone.

      The cottages contemplated each other across the roadway. The building on the left, No. 1, never distinguished for its beauty, was tumbledown, many of its windows broken; it had remained empty for some years, a little too distant from the coast to attract speculative builders. The garden had run riot in a tangle of weeds, while clawed arms of bramble reached up to the bedroom windowsills. Ivy had gained the chimney pot. On the front bank, a wattle fence had collapsed, but marigolds still flowered there, year after year.

      The opposite cottage, No. 2, to the right of the lane as Tebbutt approached, presented a more cheerful aspect. Though its original denizens had been packed off, and it had endured years of emptiness, it was now occupied and maintained. Its windows, which were open, shone brightly; all paintwork and guttering were spick and span. Its rather poky aspect had been improved by a small front porch. Its neat little garden, with stone garden seat, was planted out with flowering annuals, while the gravel drive leading to a lean-to garage was weeded and lined with box.

      A small black and white cat sat alertly on the sill of one of the upper windows, as if anticipating its master’s arrival.

      Turning in at the white gate, Tebbutt brought the car to a gingerly halt in order not to disturb the gravel, and tooted the horn.

      A comfortable-looking woman came bustling immediately round the side of the house. Her hair was dyed brown. Over her thin form she wore a handwoven red blouse, jeans, and a pair of sandals, country garb which did not entirely disguise her look of being a displaced townee.

      Removing her spectacles from her nose, she kissed Tebbutt on the lips as he emerged from the car.

      ‘Hello, Ruby love, how’s the day been?’ he asked, squeezing her narrow bottom as he embraced her.

      ‘Naughty Bolivar caught another bird this morning,’ she said, glancing up accusingly at the cat on the sill. ‘A poor little corpse was waiting for me on the back doorstep when I got home.’

      ‘Little devil,’ said Tebbutt indulgently. ‘Not another thrush? Bolivar must have killed every thrush in Norfolk by now.’

      ‘A robin this time,’ replied his wife, linking her arm in his. ‘I warned him that one day a dirty great eagle would fly down and carry him off to be fed to baby eagles.’

      ‘That should have a tonic effect on his morals.’

      Laughing, they went together by the narrow way between fence and garage, and turned in at the back porch.

      The porch was built of breezeblock topped by insecure rustic work. It had been added to the main structure by previous occupants of No. 2 Clamp Lane. The Tebbutts had camouflaged the crude wall by nailing a trellis to it and growing a Russian vine up the trellis. The vine had threatened to cover the entire cottage until Ruby took shears to it; now it was regularly clipped.

      The kitchen which they entered stretched across the rear of the building, and overlooked farmland. The view from Ruby’s sink was pleasant, but curtailed by rising ground, above which could be seen a line of treetops and one chimney, belonging to the Manor Farm in

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